Squandered: £1 in every £6 of taxpayers' money is wasted by ministers - totalling £120 billion last year alone, according to a new report

Ministers managed to waste £120billion of taxpayers’ money last year – enough to give every family in Britain a new kitchen or write off the whole of the country’s deficit, a hard-hitting report has claimed.

In a study published today, the TaxPayers’ Alliance has revealed that one pound in every six spent by the Government last year ended up being ‘squandered’.

The Bumper Book of Government Waste highlights £120billion of waste, the equivalent of £4,560 for every UK household – two and a half times the amount they found when they first conducted the exercise a decade ago.

The campaign group has calculated that curbing waste would save enough money to send every taxpayer to the World Cup in Brazil, or pay for the equivalent of three years’ worth of average energy bills for every single British household.

The report concludes: ‘£1 in every £6 of government spending in 2012-13 was wasted. The value of savings could pay for a new kitchen for every household or a trip to the World Cup in Rio for every taxpayer.

‘The amount of waste revealed is greater than the UK deficit and is bigger than the Gross Domestic Product of New Zealand.’

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The report suggests bringing public sector workers’ pay packets, pensions and sick pay in line with those in the private sector.

One of several examples of 'waste' given in the report the Welsh Assembly's alleged £33,000 spend on potted plants

It also claims the NHS spends too
much money on doctors’ wages and clinical negligence claims – and points
out the need to rein in the welfare system.

It
even suggests scrapping the entire Department for Culture, Media and
Sport and transferring all its functions elsewhere, a move it believes
would save the taxpayer around £1billion.

But the study also lists some smaller
but no less worrying examples of waste. For example the Forestry
Commission spent around £70 purchasing a bunny outfit and the Welsh
government allegedly splashed out £33,333 on potted plants.

Chief executive of the Taxpayers' Alliance, Jonathan Isaby, called for a 'war on waste' to secure a better deal for taxpayers

A Basildon council officer was paid £1,000 to investigate a picture of the mayor looking at her phone during an Armed Forces Day ceremony while another council forked out £32,000 to compensate a man who slipped on a berry in a churchyard.

The Heart of England NHS Trust blew £2,340 on only six pictures of herbs, and the Foreign Office spent £342,000 on a TV series that has still not been completed – as its production company has been dissolved.

Meanwhile Angus council spent £3,860 on a whisky tasting event for international golfers and the Ministry of Defence lost spare parts for an anti-aircraft missile system worth £527,000.

Jonathan Isaby, chief executive of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said: ‘We need a war on waste if taxpayers are to secure a better deal from the endless layers of government which are spending their hard-earned money.

‘Politicians and bureaucrats are still squandering our cash while families struggle with punishing levels of taxation.

‘Rooting out wasteful spending once and for all will mean that more money can be left in the pockets of taxpayers, who are by far the best judges of how their own money should be spent.’

But TUC general secretary Frances O’Grady criticised the report, saying: ‘These made-up numbers are based on extreme views – that every nurse is overpaid and that people who have worked hard and paid into the system should not get benefits.’